Wednesday, September 29, 2010

A group of developers from OpenOffice.org has decided to break free of Oracle, the company that owns OpenOffice.org, and released their own fork of the open source office application suite. The group, called the Document Foundation, published beta versions of its software, called LibreOffice for download on Tuesday.

There was always a conflict between Sun and Oracle regarding ownership of projects and copyright assignment. The rebellious Document Foundation is a vote of no confidence from open-source advocates in Oracle's handling of assets it acquired from Sun.

A significant difference between LibreOffice (liberated office?) and OpenOffice.org is that there will be no copyright assignment, and the code will belong to the individual developers, as it does on many other free software projects.

According to the foundation's announcement, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Novell will include LibreOffice in their versions of Linux. The foundation also secured endorsements from Google, Novell, Canonical, FSF and a number of other organization.